Owl land cut

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The federal government says its scaled-back proposal to help save the northern spotted owl from extinction would still leave the Northwest with about 33,000 fewer timber-related jobs by 1995.

The Fish and Wildlife Service on Monday proposed about a 30 percent reduction in the amount of land it earlier recommended be designated as habitat critical to the survival of the threatened bird.

Critics in the timber industry said the Fish and Wildlife Service's new proposal covering 8.2 million acres still would constitute "the largest land grab in the nation's history."

Even with the smaller designated land base, the service estimated that by 1995 the region will have 32,918 fewer timber-related jobs than was projected under forest management plans in place in the spring of 1990.

The agency said federal timber harvest levels in Oregon, Washington and northern California will fall below 2 billion board feet annually -- less than half the levels established in those outdated 1990 plans.

"The latest proposal will still create a regional economic disaster of depression-level proportions," said Mike Draper of the Western Council of Industrial Workers.

In its new proposal Monday, the Fish and Wildlife Service said 3 million acres of private land should be removed from its earlier recommendation that 11.6 million acres be designated as critical habitat.

It also pulled out about 400,000 acres of state and tribal lands that were in the previous proposal -- dropping the proposed habitat to 8.2 million acres across the three states.

"The service believes that federal and state land should be the principal focus of the owl critical habitat designation," the agency said in a statement.

Environmentalists said the reduction was acceptable because it affects mainly private lands that already have been heavily logged and are home to relatively few of the remaining 3,000 pairs of owls.

"This is probably a good step forward for the future protection of the owl," said Rindy O'Brien of The Wilderness Society.

"While it drops out private lands, there is not much old-growth left on private lands. By dropping it out, you still are preserving the core federal lands," she said.

Service officials offered no details, but said additional tens of thousands of jobs likely would have been lost by including the 3 million acres of private land as critical habitat.

Dale Hall, the service's assistant regional director for fish and wildlife enhancement in Portland, Ore., said private lands initially were included because of the belief that those lands eventually would feature old-growth characteristics that could support the owl.

He said those lands were stripped from the proposal because the service now believes the Endangered Species Act allows only for designation of habitat that currently features such characteristics.

Rep. Sid Morrison, R-Wash., said the decision was "bittersweet" because it would provide some relief for private land owners but squeeze all the elements of owl recovery onto federal lands at the expense of jobs dependent on federal harvests.

Mark Rey, executive director of the American Forest Resource Alliance, said the proposal "would still constitute the largest land grab in the nation's history."

The service declared the owl a threatened species in June 1990, citing excessive logging as the primary threat to its survival.

The new proposal covers about 3.77 million acres in Oregon, 2.68 million in Washington and 1.79 million in California. The extent to which logging can continue on those lands has been a source of much confusion.

Marvin Plenart, director of the Fish and Wildlife Service's Portland office, emphasized that logging is restricted, but not prohibited, within critical habitat areas. He said any cutting within those areas must first be approved by the service.

Hall indicated that while timber sales will be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, logging could eventually stop on as much as 7.6 million of the proposed 8.2 million acres of critical habitat.

Officials said the habitat proposal is modeled largely after the April 1990 recommendations of the Interagency Scientific Committee chaired by Forest Service biologist Jack Ward Thomas.

The new proposal is made up of about 5.2 million acres the Thomas group called "habitat conservation areas" and an additional 3 million acres surrounding those areas.

Thomas recommended last year that logging be banned within the HCAs and the Forest Service voluntarily has agreed to treat those as "no-cut" areas, Hall said Monday.

The Fish and Wildlife Service projects logging also will stop on about 80 percent of the sales planned on the 3 million surrounding acres -- or 2.4 million acres, Hall said.

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